Being thus unable to reconstruct today even the hyparchetypal stages of our primary traditions, our reconstructions of the biblical archetype often seem to transcend the limits of sound philology.
The final link in the chain of evidence, however, are the Dead Sea scrolls and biblical fragments. Their main importance for or problem is, if I may quote what I have tried to show on other occasions, that they prove on the one hand that the massoretic text did basically exist (although it did not predominate) by the end of the pre-Christian era, and that on the other hand there is a wealth, much greater than ever expected, of alternative conflicting traditions in those days, which often cannot be reduced philologically to a common denominator. Once again, the rules of our cherished philological game "LXX v. MT" have been rendered obsolete.
- M.H. Goshen Gottstein. The History of the Bible-Text and Comparative Semitics: A Methodological Problem, 1957